Dazzling a Prince, Slowly, Gently, on Point

Your world is not the only world: That’s the lesson of Romantic ballet. And when a grown woman moves from one world to another, she herself is transformed. In Prokofiev’s “Cinderella,” not only does the title character’s dream come true, but she becomes her dream version of herself.

Though there have been multiple stagings of this 1945 three-act score, the only one to stand the test of time has been Frederick Ashton’s “Cinderella” (1948), which enters the repertory of American Ballet Theater on Monday at the Metropolitan Opera House. It’s a ballet of which I hate to miss a performance. I scarcely care about changes of cast; I just love getting to know the choreography better.

Whenever anybody else is in the kitchen, Cinderella is just a supporting character on the sidelines. Center stage belongs to her grotesque Stepsisters (who, in the British tradition of Christmas pantomime dames, are played by men). She dances on point and with natural grace — but at this stage, she’s just a Second Hand Rose. Alone, she dances the step she just saw the Dancing Master teach her sisters: First she parodies them, then she shows how it should go to perfection. Next she waltzes — with her broom, which is, she thinks, her only prince for the evening.

Yet, in the ballroom, she’s at once the work’s prima ballerina, to a thrilling but baffling degree. From the moment of her first appearance at the top of the staircase, nobody questions her supremacy.

And what an entry this is! Slowly, gently, magically, on point, she descends the central staircase without seeing either the palace around her or the Prince as he, amazed, assists her into his world with one proffered hand. Everyone else present, row upon row, bows to this unknown heroine, mysteriously acknowledging her crucial importance even without knowing who on earth she is.

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The 1965 Royal Opera House production that starred, from left, Robert Helpmann, David Blair, Margot Fonteyn and Frederick Ashton.CreditG.B.L. Wilson/Royal Academy of Dance via Arenapal

During Ashton’s lifetime, the ugly sisters were often the ballet’s highlight. Ashton himself and Robert Helpmann, wonderfully naughty clowns, long gave classic performances of the roles. But this work has been rehearsed with little humor since their deaths, so that at the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden, their roles are often now just camp checklists of stale gags, without connective wit.

Never mind: This only serves to better reveal this ballet’s true nature. The greatest strokes of “Cinderella” have nothing to do with comedy. Its heart is in its steps, and they tell a story with layers beyond any in the printed program.

Cinderella begins to discover ballet’s transcendent side when, in the second half of Act I, her Fairy Godmother turns the kitchen into a space for magic. The seasons of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter dance solos for her — each complex, tight-packed, and intricate. Prokofiev’s music for them is very far from sugarcoated: Spring and Autumn sound violent, abrupt, and there is no white-Christmas charm to Winter.

Ashton gives each her own character. Spring’s jumps, with feet tucked together, were based on the idea of “bursting of buds”; Summer has alternating imagery of languor, stillness and spinning speed; Autumn has off-balance pirouettes that suggest sudden whirlwinds; and Winter, in one diagonal, seems, with her circling feet, to spread films of ice on the floor. Then the Fairy Godmother leads all four dancers in a quick recap, with all four quoting particular steps. As we realize we’re watching a theme-and-variations construction, we get a clue of what’s to follow.

Next comes the corps de ballet of 12 Stars. The waltz that Prokofiev gives them is one of his most irresistible melodies; Ashton responds to it in brilliant geometries but also with a strikingly percussive emphasis. It’s famous that his favorite two words in rehearsal were “bend” and “more”; these corps dancers bend from the waist — forward, backward, sideways — as they mark out the music’s dark pulse. Four Seasons, 12 Stars: These will be Cinderella’s retinue when she goes to the ball, but they are spirits of time, and their dances keep making us alternately conscious and heedless of the clock.

The Act II ballroom is pervaded by this double-edged sense of time. Often, a staccato delivery of steps helps to make us feel that this is no ordinary ballroom; it’s dense, charged. Indeed, it’s surreal. The Jester and the Prince’s four male companions start to quote steps from the Seasons variations (those tucked-up feet-together jumps, for instance), as if they belonged to the same magical realm as those spirits they’ve never yet met.

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Marianela Nuñez and Thiago Soares with other members of the Royal Ballet in “Cinderella” in London in 2010.CreditTristram Kenton/Royal Opera House

And at times, it becomes a chamber of mirrors, with dancers presenting choreography with their backs to us. The most enchanting example of this occurs in Cinderella’s solo. As the music of her opening phrases returns — its soft 4/4 meter suggests the quarter-hour chimes of a clock — she dances up the centerline of the stage, with her back to us. In one mini-phrase, while poised on point, she bends backward from the waist, looking calmly over her shoulder: The meter takes her from upright to arching back and then upright again on Beats 2, 3, 4 of the bar, all while poised on the same one point. Despite the dance’s strong pulse, the image suggests that she’s beyond both time and gravity.

Even when alone with the Prince, she stays remote. In their pas de deux, he no sooner lifts her than her legs beat a frisson of response. Later partnering sequences take her to greater heights of rapture. Here’s that tucked-up feet-together jump again — but, when done as a lift, it changes out of recognition.

This is one of the great ballet love scenes, and yet hero and heroine remain mysteries to each other, seldom looking at each other’s faces. As their dance comes to a close, she spins around him in one circle of turns and then another. (The sequence seems based on Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the great “Never Gonna Dance” duet of “Swing Time.”) She’s his, but she’s not; they’re together but apart.

Then, at midnight, dream switches into nightmare. Courtiers, Jester, Stars, Seasons all turn into an implacable machine, hemming her in. Ashton gives one astounding step to the four Seasons here: In unison, partnered by the Prince’s four friends, they do single fouetté turns, but the killer moment comes as they implacably lower their working legs (while the music grinds out time at its cruelest). Those feet descend like a portcullis, or like simultaneous guillotines. Cinderella seems to have been in Wonderland and through the Looking Glass; she’s the only real person onstage, and now she flees.

Back in the kitchen in Act III, Cinderella is Second Hand Rose again, all quotations; but now it’s her ballroom self she’s quoting. Those steps, that magic: What was real?

When the Prince reclaims her, she again enters a world of transcendence. Now, however, time exerts no pressure. In a supported adagio that Ashton added in the early 1960s, the largo phrase that she dances with the Prince is a variation on the step she once imitated from the Dancing Master and her Stepsisters. But now, it’s slow, grand, serene (they look each other in the face in one sequence); and the Seasons and Stars amplify it chorally. Here, at last, these lovers have world enough, and time.

Correction:

A picture caption last Sunday with an article about different ballet versions of “Cinderella,” using information from a publicist, misidentified two dancers shown performing with the Royal Ballet in a 2010 production of “Cinderella” in London. They are Marianela Nuñez and Thiago Soares — not Roberta Marquez and Steven McRae, who also are members of the company.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR13 of the New York edition with the headline: Dazzling a Prince, Slowly, Gently, on Point. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe